Israel’s public conversation has collapsed into a single, burning question: how badly will the Iranian misadventure damage the Likud and the prime minister who staked his legacy on it? Will the failure to topple Tehran's radical regime – or to neutralise the nuclear threat — finally bring down the most hardline government in Israel's history when voters go to the polls in October? Even Benjamin Netanyahu's closest admirers now concede that the memorandum of understanding is a grave blow to Israel’s most vital interests. And, as always, the scapegoats have been identified: the European Union, the antisemites, the “deep state”, the opposition. Some have now trained their sights on President Donald Trump himself – the saviour of Israel recast, overnight, as its betrayer.
The opposition, from the center and the left, is no warmer towards the diplomacy unfolding between Israel’s closest ally and its most implacable enemy. Netanyahu’s opponents have made his exclusion from the table – and Washington’s refusal to grant him any influence over the negotiations – the centrepiece of their campaign. All this outrage, all this positioning, before anyone, including the President of the United States, knows what the final agreement will actually contain: above all, whether it will carry safeguards strong enough to stop Iran from enriching uranium.
As a matter of fact, the Israeli voter need not wait 60 days to take stock of the strategic damage Netanyahu's policy has already done. For a generation, Israeli deterrence rested on a single impression across the region: that Netanyahu could bend American Middle East policy to his will. In 2001, secretly filmed in the West Bank settlement of Ofra, he boasted: “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily… They won’t get in the way.”
However, the memorandum with Tehran was negotiated, sealed and defended entirely behind his back – a settlement he himself calls an abyss. The tail no longer wags the dog.
The most significant clause in the summit communiqué, from Israel’s perspective, concerns the establishment of a De-Conflict Cell in which the United States, Iran, Lebanon, Qatar and Pakistan will serve as partners to guarantee the ceasefire. Israel is not mentioned at all.
For half a century, a single Israeli doctrine held firm: act alone, seek forgiveness later. From the destruction of Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981, to the elimination of Syria's covert reactor in 2007, to the strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities in 2025, Israel reserved the right to strike first and answer questions afterwards. Once the final accord is signed, ratified by Congress, written into American law and adopted by the UN Security Council, that freedom will be gone. To bomb a country with which the United States has just concluded a formal agreement would no longer be a daring raid; it would be an assault on American diplomacy itself, a line no Israeli government will lightly cross.
Another bitter pill that Israel must swallow is Washington’s tacit recognition of Iran’s central role in Lebanon – a sphere of influence not in some distant theatre but pressed directly against Israel’s northern border. There is no sign that Israel’s demand to bind Iran to ending its support for Hezbollah and Hamas was ever seriously on the table. As Israel pushes deeper into Lebanon, Iran inserts itself as a stakeholder the Americans feel compelled to accommodate. The deterrent logic has inverted. Nor will it stop at Lebanon: tomorrow it may be the West Bank and Gaza, where an emboldened Tehran can claim a stake in any settlement; and beyond that, a rehabilitated Iran may force Saudi Arabia to hedge its bets. The Abraham Accords were designed to draw the Gulf towards Israel. What was meant to isolate Iran has isolated Israel instead.
The starkest measure of the widening gulf between Washington and Jerusalem came from the president’s own words. Trump’s acknowledgement of Iran’s right to long-range missiles was no offhand remark; it was the quiet abandonment of America’s commitment to preserve Israel’s qualitative military edge – a guarantee written into American law and reaffirmed by every president for nearly five decades. Once Washington concedes that Israel’s principal enemy may freely field the very weapons that the commitment hitherto denied, that guarantee is worthless.
Israel’s deep-seated preference for military power over diplomacy has exposed a philosophical and moral chasm between the Jewish state and the liberal democracies of the West. The present crisis throws that impulse into sharp relief – diplomacy treated not as a tool to be shaped, but as a threat to be killed. When the United States and Iran were building their back-channel through Oman, Netanyahu rejected an Omani offer to open an Israeli-Iranian channel and barred his own intelligence service from any contact with Tehran. As the 2015 deal neared completion, he flew to Congress to torpedo it, warning it would "pave Iran's path to the bomb". When Washington finally tore up the agreement in 2018, he declared it a triumph – vindicated, he said, by the stolen nuclear archive he had unveiled to the world.
The scoreboard is damning. The 2015 deal he helped destroy had frozen enrichment and placed inspectors on the ground. Its collapse left Iran free to enrich at will, and a decade of sabotage, assassination and finally open war did not kill the programme – it hardened it, driving the most sensitive work deep under a mountain at Fordow. Now, with both sides exhausted, Washington and Tehran are signing an interim deal: Iran intact, rehabilitated, and – as Trump’s words on its missiles confirmed – no longer bound by even the pretence of the old constraints.
Whether they like the deal or not, no prudent Israeli government can afford to antagonise this president. It is Trump’s willingness to look away that allows the de facto annexation of much of the West Bank – and the ruins of Gaza – to pass without American censure. Aggravate him over Iran, and that forbearance can be withdrawn in a single sentence. By turning Iran into a partisan wedge – aligning Israel with one party against the other – Netanyahu has taught Democrats to regard Israel as a Republican cause.